


it may shake you but you won't fall

by SerpaSas



Series: trial by erosion [2]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Gay Character, Canon Queer Character, Drug Addiction, Homophobia, M/M, Meeting the Family, No Apocalypse (Umbrella Academy), Post-Season/Series 01, Queer Bashing, Rehab, sibling relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-06
Updated: 2020-08-06
Packaged: 2021-03-05 23:02:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,083
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25753285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SerpaSas/pseuds/SerpaSas
Summary: After Diego does his best to not make being introduced to a ghost he can’t see awkward as hell and Ben and him excuse themselves with a crack about giving them some privacy, Klaus nearly tackles Dave in a hug, wrapping his arms around him and burrowing his face into his neck. He smells nearly the same as he always did, the only trace of the grave the slight smell of blood— mostly, he smells like sweat and dirt and gunpowder, and underneath like Dave.“I missed you,” Klaus tells him, voice thick. “I really, really missed you.”The first day of Dave being back, with memories of Klaus' past
Relationships: Dave/Klaus Hargreeves
Series: trial by erosion [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1309358
Comments: 13
Kudos: 340
Collections: Numerous OTPS Infinite Fandoms





	it may shake you but you won't fall

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from the song Story of My Life by Astronautalis
> 
> This is the longest single chapter fic I've ever written. I've been working on it for, like, a year, just kind of writing scenes as they came to me and attempting to stitch them together. I don't know how well it flows, but I'm pretty happy with all of them individually. So, I hope you enjoy!

After Diego does his best to not make being introduced to a ghost he can’t see awkward as hell and Ben and him excuse themselves with a crack about giving them some privacy, Klaus nearly tackles Dave in a hug, wrapping his arms around him and burrowing his face into his neck. He smells nearly the same as he always did, the only trace of the grave the slight smell of blood— mostly, he smells like sweat and dirt and gunpowder, and underneath like _Dave_. After all these months without him, it brings tears to his eyes.

Dave wraps his arms around him tight, strong and steady. It only makes the tears come faster, but for the first time in far too long, they aren’t from frustration or heartbreak. They’re just _joy_.

“I missed you,” Klaus tells him, voice thick. “I really, really missed you.”

“I know, I’m sorry,” Dave whispers. Klaus can feel his breath against his skin, cooler than it used to be but everything is cooler here than it was in Vietnam. Klaus has always run unsettling cold, his body heat leeched off by the dead that always surround him— even when he's high, he's still got Ben there, so even lukewarm tends to feel normal to him. It's why he loves a hot bath so much. “I tried to find you— I figured if I waited long enough, I’d catch you between highs eventually, but you were gone. I didn’t expect to find you here. Now?”

The thought that Dave had tried to find him back in A Shau only to find out Klaus had left breaks his heart. Through many conversations with various friendly ghosts over the years, Klaus has figured out that they don’t seem to experience time the same way as the living unless they attach themselves to a living person the way Ben has to him; death tends to make silly things like linear time unimportant. Dave probably hasn’t been waiting fifty years to see him again, but the few months Klaus has waited were long enough for him.

That Dave had been willing to haunt Klaus, watch him use until one way or another he sobered up long enough to see him— he doesn’t even want to think about that. It was tough enough a life (death?) for Ben, who could interact with him even when he was so fucked up he barely knew his own name. Dave hadn’t ever seen him at his worst, passing out in alleys with a needle still in his arm, but he had heard enough whispered admissions to be able to guess.

“Well,” he says, suddenly unspeakably happy to have almost half a year of sobriety under his belt, “Good news. I’ve been clean for over five months, now, so. You won’t be waiting around for me to see you, ever. I promise.” It's a dangerous promise to make, when he spends so much time daydreaming about relapsing, even if it happens less and less the longer he goes on, and the idea of taking something that would take his beautiful man away from him, right now, is incomprehensible.

Dave pulls back far enough to look at him, the corners of his eyes crinkled with his smile, and that makes the promise worth it. “Yeah?”

Klaus, smiles back, helplessly. “Yeah.”

Dave leans forward to press a kiss to his forehead, cool lips resting there for several moments before moving to kiss one cheek and then the other, before pulling him into a proper kiss.

Klaus doesn’t know how long he’ll be able to keep him solid, as tired as he was from trying most of the evening to summon him. It figures that in the end, he’d do it accidentally. It does actually make sense, if they’re following the theory that his power runs on emotions, that seeing the picture of him would be what finally did it. But for now, he just kisses him. 

Eventually, Klaus does have to stop to breathe, so he reluctantly pulls away and rests their foreheads together, then pulls Dave over to sit on his bed, curling up next to him and resting his head on his shoulder.

After a while of just… holding each other, like they barely ever got the chance to, before, when every touch had to be careful and time to themselves was mostly used for sex, Dave finally addresses the elephant in the room.

“Klaus? Where are we?”

Klaus says, automatically, like the dick he actually is, “My bedroom.” 

Dave, the saint he actually is, snorts and nudges his shoulder. “Come on,”

“You were right, before. When you said _now_ instead of _here_ ,” he admits. “I’m… sort of from the future, I guess. It’s 2019.” And then he tells him the whole sordid tale, about time travelling hitmen who kidnapped and tortured him, how he stole their briefcase, how it was the very same briefcase that in the first few weeks in ‘Nam he had guarded like his life depended on it, the briefcase that had eventually just become one more belonging, something he guarded more out of the duty of not letting some other poor bastard end up in some other time. How, after Dave died, he stumbled to his bunk in shock and left that time.

Dave runs a hand through Klaus’ hair slowly, soothingly. “I’m so fucking sorry, baby.”

“Don’t,” he chokes out. “Don’t apologize. It’s not your fault, not at all, Dave.”

“I can still be sorry you went through all that, Klaus.” He presses another kiss to the side of his head. “I’d also be real glad to go a few rounds with those two assholes for doing that to you. You were real bad off when you first showed up at camp.”

Klaus smiles up at him weakly. “Five seems to think they’re gone, for now, at least. Hazel apparently retired or something, gave us the guns they used to kill Diego’s cop friend and clear his name. Cha-Cha… she’s either dead or we’ll be seeing her soon.” He considers it for a second, then adds, “Or, y’know, both.”

Dave snorts and shakes his head, bringing a hand up to run through Klaus’ hair, trace the shell of his ear, stroke his cheekbone, touch his lower lip. All those affectionate touches that were so small and yet all the bigger for it. Klaus had never thought himself touch-starved but thinks maybe he was gentleness-starved, affection-starved. He’s had more of that in the months since they didn’t/did save the world, but it was never the same. 

“God, I love you,” Klaus tells him, almost choking on how much he means it, feels it.

Dave smiles, that beautiful, sun-bright smile, and says, “I love you, too.”

.

When Klaus is twenty-three, a week or two or maybe a month after his second OD bad enough to land him in the back of an ambulance, he’s with some friends/fellow junkies walking down the street when a passing cop recognizes one of them as having broken parole.

He— Barry? Harry? Something like that— runs, and the cop chases him while the rest of them scatter. Klaus is too high to take Ben seriously when he tries to wave him off turning down an alley and ends up stuck at a dead end fence with two of the others who followed him because they were too high to use critical thinking skills with the first cop’s partner looking honestly a little disappointed in their escape skills. In retrospect, Klaus is pretty disappointed in himself, too. Nineteen years of lessons about how to escape a pursuer when eyeball clawing or what the fuck ever doesn’t work and his first instinct is to get trapped. Look at him now, dad!

“Seriously, guys?” The cop asks. The two other guys seem to have pretty much given up, which is pretty stupid since they _definitely_ have enough drugs on them to get pinched for dealing. But also, any of them try to scale that fence right now they are super falling off and breaking a neck. Klaus still eyes it longingly.

“Don’t you fucking dare, Klaus,” Ben warns him. He pouts.

The cop is rolling her eyes, now, a bit of sympathy bleeding through her expression. She’s young, young enough that she might be fresh out of the police academy, still bright eyed and bushy tailed, still believing that junkies like them can _turn their lives around, honestly!_ if only someone gives them a chance.

“Sorry, officer. Just didn’t want to be associated with someone so obviously on the wrong side of the law,” he says. Or tries to say. He’s fucking high as _shit_.

Lady Cop’s eyes flicker over to him, then stare. Something in his stomach sinks, because he knows that look. Recognition. It doesn’t happen to him much anymore, not with the final growth spurt and the facial hair that’s finally started growing in right, with the makeup and the clothes, so different than anything dad ever let him wear in public, but it still happens, sometimes, and fuck this if she asks for an autograph he’s gonna scream and climb that fence—

“You’re Diego’s brother, aren’t you?”

That. Was not what he was expecting.

“Holy shit, you know Diego?” It makes sense, is the thing. Last he heard of his brother, the first of them to leave, he had been in cop school, too. He had shown up for Ben’s funeral almost as drunk as Klaus had been. Ben hadn’t come back yet, honestly luckily because that funeral would have been ten times more awkward if Ben had just been… hovering.

After the funeral, he had let Klaus drain the rest of whatever cheap paint thinner alcohol he had brought with him and given him his number, told him to call when he finally gave up on the joke of the Umbrella Academy and followed him out the door.

A week later, Ben had shown back up. A week after that, he had left home with a bag full of stolen shit and pretty much nothing else. He had thought about calling Diego, even for a piece of dry ground to sleep on for a night, but then he had pawned the shit he stole and gotten very, very high. By the time he came back down, the scrap of paper was long gone. He doesn’t even know if he brought it with him.

“You have a brother?” Fellow Junkie #1 slurs. Donny or Dan or something.

“Didn’t know you had a brother,” Fellow Junkie #2 follows up. Klaus knows that one’s name, because everyone calls him Star for reasons unknown.

“I’ve got four.” He tells them weakly. His eyes catch on Ben, dead as dead can be even if he looks more alive than any ghost he’s ever known. Lately, he could swear the guy is _aging_. “Well, three.” Then he remembers Five, little Number Five who never took a person name and was so goddamn stubborn, who ignored their dad and left years before any of them had the balls. Little Five, who still, after ten years— _ten goddamn years_ — had yet to even shown a sign of life (or death), a dozen different private eyes and countless obsessed fans turning up nothing, nothing at all. “No. I’ve got two.”

Star has the look of complete sincerity only the truly fucked up can manage, reaching out from his place slumped on the ground to pat his ankle. “My baby sister died, too.”

Lady Cop sighs heavily, shakes her head. Before he can say anything, she leans over and says into her radio, “I lost ‘em, any luck?”

While her partner reports back in that he’d caught Simon— so _not_ Barry or Harry, oops— Klaus stares in shock. Fellow Junkies seem to be nodding off. Star’s hand is still on his ankle.

After she’s done with cop business, she sighs again, pulling out a piece of paper and a pen. “Listen,” she says. “Just… call Diego. Tell him you’re _alive_ , at least.” She makes a face. “ _Do not_ tell him I even _slightly_ bent the rules for you.”

He takes the paper with his brother’s number numbly, watches as she walks away. “I don’t even know your name, officer!”

At the edge of the alley, she turns back and smiles. “I’m Patch. It’s nice to meet you.”

.

When they go down for breakfast the next morning, they find all his siblings waiting at the table. When they see Klaus walk in, they all turn and stare, grinning.

“Um,” he greets them, glancing at Dave and Ben.

Ben doesn’t seem bothered, going to his seat. Since he started being visible to the others, sometimes, Klaus isn’t the only one setting his place.

WE HEARD YOU FOUND A CERTAIN SOMEONE LAST NIGHT, Allison says. It’s clearly been pre-written, ready and waiting for him to walk in. He turns to look at Diego.

He grins, the bastard. “Sorry, man, I had to tell them.”

Klaus sniffs, tries to hide the smile that keeps springing up onto his face. “It’s true. I did find Dave.” He turns to smile at him. “He’s here.”

Luther clears his throat. “We, uh. Got another chair.”

They did. The kitchen table was getting cramped, not meant for the eight chairs that had been shoved at it after they did/didn’t save the world and decided mom needed a place too, and definitely not the nine that now sat around it. It looked ridiculous. It looked like a real home.

Ushering Dave into the seat next to his own, Klaus said, “Everyone, this is Dave— Dave Katz. I do realize I am introducing you to an invisible man, but please imagine the sexiest guy you’ve ever seen sitting here.”

“ _Klaus_ ,” Dave complains, a faint flush colouring his cheeks while his siblings grin. The sight of blood he doesn’t have rising to his skin makes Klaus’ heart skip a beat; in his darkest moments, these past few months, the possibility that Dave would be like so many other ghosts, absent the humanity he so loved in him and feared in the dead when he found him had been a fear he couldn’t speak, not even to Ben. To see the evidence that it wasn’t true right in front of him made his already most likely ridiculous grin grow even more.

“You are!” He insists, “Diego even said so!”

Diego rolls his eyes. “I think what I said was he’s too hot for _you_ ,” he teases.

“Wait,” Luther asks, “When did you see Dave?”

“Diego, the caring brother he is, stole me a picture of our unit.”

PICTURE? Allison asks.

Five grins and disappears, appearing a second later back in his seat holding the photo. Dave sits upright with a start. Everyone but the two of them and Ben crowd around the frame.

“That’s Dave,” Diego points him out for the others.

“ _Anyways_ ,” Klaus says loudly as his asshole siblings dart their eyes between the photo and the empty chair they see. Allison is grinning in delight, Diego and Five are smirking, and even Vanya is smiling without the usual shaky edges to it. Luther is the first to return to his seat, sighing like he’s the only reasonable person there.

Just for that, Klaus starts with him, moving over to stand behind his chair. “Dave, this is Luther, aka Number One. He’s got super strength and lived on the moon for a few years.”

“Four years,” Luther mutters under his breath. They all try not to roll their eyes.

“The moon,” Dave repeats faintly. He had died before the moon landing had actually happened; there had been a lot of talk about it, even in Vietnam, but they were still five months out from the actual launch. To come from that to a man living on the moon for years was quite a jump.

“You’ll get tired about hearing about it pretty quick,” Ben assures him.

Dave shakes his head in disbelief before visibly deciding to put that aside for now. Klaus moves on to Vanya next, in the interest of not making her last like she always was. “This is Vanya, easily the most powerful of us. Really good writer, amazing violinist.”

“I’m not _amazing_ , Klaus.” She argues.

“Wait ’til you hear her play, Dave, it’s incredible. She’s first chair in her orchestra! Their next concert’s in a couple weeks. Hey! You can come with us!” He’s had this same realization about every ten minutes since Dave appeared to him last night— that he was _here_ , really _here_.

“I’d love to,” he says, the corners of his eyes crinkling with his smile. Klaus pauses for a moment just to smile back before moving on with introductions.

“You met Diego, our resident brooding, knife throwing vigilante. He can curve anything he throws, hence the knives, and also hold his breath for… ever. Basically. Most importantly, he’s the biggest momma’s boy you will ever meet.”

Diego shrugs Klaus’ hands off his shoulders and Dave’s lips twitch in a smile. “Anything he throws— what, like a curveball?” He asks.

“More like, he can throw things around corners. Diego?”

Diego obligingly picks up his butter knife and tosses it across the room. It takes a sharp left turn in midair. Dave whistles low, impressed.

Stepping up to Allison, he slings an arm around her shoulders. “This is Allison, she’s a movie star. An actual movie star, she’s like, super famous.”

“We’re all famous, Klaus.” Five points out, refusing to look up from his book like all this is above him.

He waves that away. “The rest of us are has-beens, she actually gets recognized on the street.” He looks up to smile at Dave. “She’s actually a really good actress. I’ll show you my favourites.”

“I look forward to seeing them, Miss.” Dave tells her, and Klaus repeats it.

THANK YOU, she writes, a small, pleased smile on her face.

Dave hesitates, then asks, in an undertone, “Is she alright? With the—“ he touches his throat lightly, looking at the still evident scar across her throat and notepad.

Ben, bless him, takes that question so Vanya doesn’t have to relive it anymore than she already does. “There was an— accident. Her voice doesn’t work, anymore. It’s why Klaus didn’t mention a power; she used to be able to get people to do anything she wanted by saying it.”

Before the pause the rest of them are hearing can get too long, Klaus moves over to Number Five. “This adorable little bastard is Number Five, the only one older than me,” he begins.

“Wait, what?” Dave cuts him off, looking over the thirteen year old.

At the same time, Five says, “I’m a fifty-eight year old assassin, I’m not _adorable_.”

When Dave only looks more confused— which, fair— Klaus tells him, “Five, as you saw before, can phase through space and also, apparently, time. I told you about my brother who went missing when we were kids? It turns out, he time travelled to the future and got stuck for, like, fifty years—“

“Forty-five.”

“—forty-five years, and when he figured out how to get back he fucked up and got shoved back into his thirteen year old self, who you now see before you.”

Dave says, “I have about a thousand questions about… everything you just said, but did he say ‘assassin’? He’s a time travelling assassin? Like…”

Klaus’ smile drops. “Yeah. It’s a long, depressing story. I’ll— fill you in later?”

He nods slowly, watching the way Klaus’ shoulders drop in relief. “Second question: ‘Number Five’? You called Luther Number One, but…”

“Oh,” Klaus says. “Yeah, we didn’t have names until we were— what, eight?” He looks around at his siblings, who were nodding. They were pretty used to only hearing one side of his ghostly conversations, at this point. He points to them one by one. “Numbers One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, and Seven. Five wouldn’t take a name when mom was giving them, stubborn ass.”

Dave was quiet for a few moments before saying, with feeling, “What the _fuck_ , Klaus.”

He smiles, tight and painful. “Believe me, the unnamed children thing is pretty low on the list of fucked up shit daddy dearest did.”

It’s still a shock when Luther’s the one to say “no kidding,” while the rest of them nod. Their overgrown monkey brother is really making progress on the ‘fuck dad’ train, it’s a beauty to behold.

“I knew he was a fucking asshole, but not giving you names is…” Dave shakes his head.

“Well, he’s dead now, so fuck him, yeah?” Klaus tries to smile brightly, tries to change the subject as he moves to stand behind Ben, now. “Speaking of dead, so is Ben. His superpower is interdimensional tentacle monsters coming out of his stomach.”

Dave just stares at them for a long time before shaking his head, obviously dismissing this, too, as unimportant to introductions. “Nice to meet you properly, Ben. I heard a lot about you, back in ‘Nam.”

Ben smiles. “Well, we’ve all heard a _lot_ about _you_ since Klaus got back, so we’re probably even.”

He looks startled, and pleased, when his eyes move to Klaus. “Yeah?”

“Oh, yeah,” Ben says, in that deliberate sibling way, all ‘I’m gonna embarrass you now’. As Klaus has spent the past decade and a half too high to get embarrassed about things, he gets the feeling Ben’s gonna milk this for all it’s worth. “Klaus barely ever shuts up about you. ‘Dave could fix any of the Jeeps, he’s so smart, Dave could dig a whole ditch on his own, he’s so strong and tough, Dave could make anyone feel safe in a war zone, he’s so _amazing_ —“

“Okay!” Klaus says loudly. Everyone is staring at him, presumably at his warming cheeks.

Dave stares at him too, but it’s with so much goddamn love.

Luther eventually clears his throat into what sounds, to the living, like silence, and starts up a conversation. Klaus sits down, and smiles.

.

The first time he runs out of drugs in A Shau, Dave finds him puking behind a tree.

He should have seen it coming, _had_ seen it coming in his dwindling supplies. He hasn’t been able to go on a full on bender like he _really_ wants to do— being too high to function out here is a good way to get dead, as Stevie the guy who liked to shoot up heroin had proven his first week out here when he passed out on the line and got his brains blown out.

So he mostly just does enough to even out, keep the dead— the unrelenting dead, there are so _many_ here, more than every graveyard he’s ever been locked in and every hospital he’s woken up in, American and Vietnamese and Korean and French and and and, he hadn’t known there were so many countries in this stupid war and for once in his life he wished he had payed attention when Pogo had taught them history, he isn’t even totally sure what they’re fucking fighting for except it has something to do with the Russians which doesn’t even make _sense_ — at bay. He doesn’t want to fucking die and, bizarrely, he doesn’t want to let the other guys down. He’s been here almost three months, and the other guys in his unit think he’s fucking weird and definitely pegged him as a queer but most seem to be okay with him if he does his fucking job and never actually brings it up they seem okay to let it slide.

Which is great, because he could probably fight better fucking asleep than he could right now.

“Klaus? You okay?” Dave rests a hand on the back of his neck, crouching down next to him where he’s kneeling on the ground, shaking.

“A-okay. Just… sick.”

Dave huffs, rubs up and down his back. “You’re out of drugs, right? Booky is, too. Everyone’s starting to feel it, with supply lines cut.”

This is the thing— as numerous as drugs are, here, between what the officers hand out and the stuff brought back from the cities, they still run out faster than rations or clean water. Here, where half the guys are using _something_ , trying to deal with the absolute hell they’ve found themselves in, they dry up quick. Everyone’s pretty confident that the supply truck will be coming through long before they start having to worry about going hungry or running out of bullets, but for the addicts of the unit, they’re fucked.

Of course, the rest of the guys don’t have to worry about the endless stream of ghosts haunting the camp and jungles, a never-ending parade of gory deaths, people who’d been shot full of holes and lost limbs, people who’d been napalmed to a crisp or stepped on a landmine. Men and women and children, soldiers and civilians. It’s the stuff of nightmares, would be even if the dead hadn’t been his literal nightmare since childhood.

“I don’t want to _see_ them anymore,” he tells Dave, desperate for him to understand. “They’re—” _Terrified, angry, scary, screaming_. What are the dead? How do you describe the dead to someone who can’t see them? “—the worst.”

Dave’s hand, warm and soothing, doesn’t pause its movement on his back. “Who are?”

Klaus shudders, bites his lip. He’s hasn’t had to _tell_ someone he sees dead people since he was a little tiny kid, when his power had first manifested and a man with no legs had started dragging himself after him, begging for help. Once the Umbrella Academy took off after that bank robbery, everyone who knew his name knew what he could do. It wasn’t a whole thing. “The dead,” he admits in something close to a whisper. “They’re fucking _everywhere_ , here. The drugs block them out, but without them I—“

Dave’s hand does stop, then, pausing for a moment before it resumes it’s slow, soothing movements. “Like— ghosts?” He asks. “You’re seeing ghosts right now?”

There isn’t doubt in his voice, exactly. He believes that Klaus is seeing dead people, believes he’s _seeing_ something. The thought of Dave, of all people, believing he’s as crazy as he probably is makes something in his chest hurt. His words pick up speed, desperation. “I’ve seen them since I was a kid. Whenever I’m sober, I see them. It’s not— drug induced hallucinations, or, or any kind of hallucination. It’s real.” He squeezes his eyes shut tight. “I swear it’s real.”

“Hey, Klaus, it’s okay, you’re gonna be okay.” They’re far enough away from camp that Dave pulls him into a hug, pressing a kiss to the side of his head.

He collapses further into his chest, shaking and sweaty, and he’s gonna have to throw up again in a minute. “I’m not crazy,” he says, like every obviously crazy person before him.

“You’re a lot of things, babe, but you aren’t crazy. Not any more than the rest of us, anyways.” Dave murmurs in his ear. He stays with him behind that tree while Klaus throws up the bile that’s the only thing left in his stomach and walks him back to his cot, shaky on his feet, does his best to nurse him through the withdrawal.

And later, when supplies are back and Klaus is floating in the soft haze of opioids and pot, free of ghosts and withdrawal both, Dave asks him about it again.

The temptation to lie, to laugh it off and make up shit about the withdrawal messing with his head is strong, but the desire to let Dave know him is stronger. “Yeah,” he admits, “I— can see ghosts. Not now, but— yeah, when I’m clean. I see them.”

Dave makes a humming noise, considering. Something in Klaus’ stomach wants to climb out his throat. “I’ve heard of people seeing shit high, heard of them seeing shit sober. Never heard of anyone seeing shit when they’re sober but not when they’re high. And believing it both times.” He studies his face in the dark, eyes more soft than considering. “Guess I gotta believe you.”

“Wha— really? I drop the ‘I see dead people’ thing on you and you, what? Just believe me?”

He shrugs. “Guess so.”

“Why the hell would you believe me?” Klaus asks, baffled. Honestly baffled. It’s not an emotion he feels, much, as the person usually doing the baffling.

“You stare at things that aren’t there, when you’re coming down.”

“That could just be me being nuts, Dave.”

“You knew Baker was dead before Doc had even left the tent.”

Baker had taken a shot to the guts a day before Klaus ran out of drugs and was trying to stretch them out, hovering between just high enough not to see ghosts and just sober enough to catch them out of the corner of his eye, hear their whispers. It had been a slow, bloody death for Baker. They’d been unable to move him to a MASH unit when they couldn’t even get rations in; he had died and come to Klaus the way all ghosts seemed to want to while he was sitting in the mess, trying to get some food in his stomach. He had been so out of it he’d announced the kid was dead to the table. News made it out of the med tent ten minutes later. Klaus didn’t have any argument to that— he’ll probably have to deal with rumours about him being some kind of psychic, now.

Dave laughs a little, a sad, soft noise. “If anyone was gonna be able to do something they shouldn’t be able to do, it’d be you.”

There was an argument to that, that he knew five other people who could do a lot more impressive shit than he could, that there were apparently thirty-six other people he’d never met but was inexplicably tied to who could apparently do stuff no one should be able to do. That the stolen briefcase he had under his cot did something it shouldn’t be able to do.

He doesn’t say any of that, in the end. He likes the way Dave looks at him like he’s something special, likes that he believes him. He’ll tell him some other time; this had been enough confession for one week.

.

“Your family… doesn’t seem to care.” Dave says carefully, after everyone has scattered to do their own things, leaving them alone in the kitchen.

Klaus stops rummaging through the fridge, turning to look at his boyfriend. “Surprisingly, they actually care a lot, but I feel like you mean _care_ in a specific way, not the general way.”

He smiles. “You always said your family was okay with you being,” he waves at Klaus’— well, everything, the crop top and Allison’s pink leggings, the nail polish and the makeup Dave had watched him apply before they came down for breakfast, lounging in his bed while Klaus glanced up from his mirror every ten seconds to check that Dave was really, truly there.

“Queer as a three dollar bill?” He jokes.

They had had that conversation, back in A Shau. The guys had been talking about family one night, and Dave had been suspiciously quiet. He had asked him later, when they had some privacy, and he had admitted he had gotten kicked out when he was seventeen after small town gossip about Dave’s sexuality had made the rounds and he hadn’t denied it when his dad confronted him. He had pretty rightly assumed that Klaus, who could barely keep his sexuality an unspoken thing even with their superiors, would have had trouble hiding it at home. Dave, who believed him about being able to see dead people almost instantly, had a much harder time believing his siblings and mom had been fine with it and his dad didn’t have an opinion at all.

Dave smiles a little. “Sure, let’s go with that.”

He smiles back, and says the same thing he’d said back in Vietnam. “They had a lot of stuff to hold against me, liking boys was pretty far down the list.” But now, after almost half a year of building some kind of relationship with his siblings to save the world, he adds, “They also apparently love me more than they hate my bullshit.” He sighs, making a face. “We’ve been working on it. Fixing everything dad messed up. We got Luther to say ‘fuck dad’ so that was a huge step in reestablishing trust.”

“Well, from what you told me about Luther back in ‘Nam, that sounds like he’s had a pretty big change of policy,” Dave comments lightly.

Klaus shrugs. “Secrets came out. Luther finally had to own up to all the fucked up shit dad did _being_ fucked up. And then— you asked about Allison’s throat? Why she can’t talk?”

“Ben said it was an accident, but he hesitated before he chose that word.”

“Yeah…” Klaus sighs. “It was an accident, more or less, but, uh, Vanya did it.”

Dave’s brows shot up to his hairline in surprise. “ _Vanya_? I know you said she’s the most powerful, whatever that means, but…”

“Well, see, none of us knew Vanya even had powers until almost six months ago. Good old Reggie decided her powers were too powerful for him to control, so he started her on these pills to suppress them.” He shoots a sardonic look at Dave. “Pretty hypocritical of him to judge me for doing same thing for myself, with all the self medicating.” Dave lifts a hand to Klaus’s cheek, his corporeal hand gently resting on his cheek. Klaus smiles softly at him, then it slips into a sad smile. “Not even Vanya knew she had powers. Because dad had Allison use her power on Vanya, to make her forget she had powers, and make her think she was just ordinary.”

“Jesus Christ, Klaus, that’s…” Dave shakes his head in horror.

“Yeah. And when Vanya, who’d discovered her powers, found out the reason she spent her whole life feeling like there wasn’t _anything_ special about her, and that reason was _Allison_ … she got angry, lashed out with her powers. But, Dave, when you’re first learning how to handle these things, these powers, it can be real hard to control them, especially in Vanya’s case when they were already incredibly powerful as a kid and then she never got any training, just had them stuffed down. She… she got angry at Allison. The power just exploded out of her, slit her throat, on accident. Then Luther overreacted, locked Vanya in a cell, she went into some kind of disassociation, blew up the house, and then the moon, ending the world. But! Five traveled us back a few days, long enough to _not_ lock Vanya in a nightmare room and instead talk our shit out. So all that was a pretty big wakeup call, for Luther.”

“Shit, it better have been.”

“Oh, he still sucks at it, he has the most bullshit brainwashing from dad’s training left, but he’s trying.” Klaus smirks. “He started reading about addiction, and addiction recovery. And also about PTSD in veterans.”

Dave frowns. “PTSD?”

“Oh, shit, what’d you call it, uh, war neurosis? Where you’re messed up from the war even though you’re back home.”

“Have you been dealing with that?” Dave asks.

Klaus sighs, but smiles and takes Dave’s hand. He is so thankful he had practised so much with making Ben tangible for longer periods of time these past months.

“I’ve been okay, Dave. It’s been hard, but I got a therapist, and she’s helping, and so are my family. I’ve been okay. And now you’re here…”

“I’ll do anything I can to help you, baby, I swear.” Dave promises.

Giggling, Klaus shakes his head. “Just having you here helps, Davie. Just having you here.”

.

When Klaus is twenty-five, he gets jumped by a group of assholes who take issue with his face— or, more accurately, his makeup— and beat him so bad Ben threatens to sing Wheels On the Bus for the rest of eternity unless he goes to the hospital. Honestly, Ben doesn’t really need to threaten him, he’s losing an alarming amount of blood from a gash in head that definitely needs stitches, he’s dizzy as shit, something’s off with his wrist, and he thinks he might have a broken rib. Plus, Ben is as frantic as he was the first time they’d had to restart Klaus’ heart in the back of an ambulance, his eyes wide and terrified.

He was right about the need for stitches and the busted ribs, but he also has a concussion, a broken hand, and two broken fingers.

He nods off in the ER bed they put him in while they wait for the rest of his x-rays to come down, and when he wakes up, Diego is sitting next to him.

He hasn’t seen his brother since they were nineteen, only talked to him on the phone a handful of times since Patch (Eudora, Diego calls her, with far too much affection for the ‘just friends’ he insists they are and the ‘ex-colleagues’ she does) gave him his number. They haven’t spoken in almost half a year.

“Hey, man,” Diego greets him when he notices his eyes opening.

“He’s been here for almost half an hour,” Ben reports. He’s staring at their brother in some undefinable way, happiness and sadness and love and frustration. Ben’s admitted that when he’s not with Klaus, he goes to check on the others, but there’s a difference between haunting the living and and actually getting to talk to them. Ben hasn’t exchanged a single word with Diego since they were seventeen.

Klaus groans, acknowledging both statements. His whole body hurts like hell, his head is pounding like the mother of all hangovers, breathing makes sharp aches shoot through his ribs, his left hand feels mangled from fingertips to above the wrist, and he’s definitely feeling the black eye and dozens of other bruises that are starting to settle in for the long haul all over his body.

Diego looks over him, lips pursed in badly concealed concern, eyebrows pinched in anger. “Shit, Klaus,” he says after a few moments. “What the hell happened?”

“Some guys jumped me,” he tries to say, but has to clear his throat a couple times before it’ll come out right.

“‘Some guys’?” Diego repeats in disbelief. “I haven’t seen you this beat up since those arms dealers.”

They had been sixteen, and Klaus had long since been relegated to look out, rarely sober enough to use even his limitedly useful power. He had just got back home when the mission alarm went off, still coming down from his new best friend morphine, nodding off in the ride over to the warehouse the arms dealers were using as a base. He could swear he only closed his eyes for a second, and suddenly he was surrounded. He was too groggy to put up any kind of a fight; hilariously, this situation mirrored that one pretty well.

He squints down at his busted hand. “It was a broken arm, then.”

Diego huffs, looks down at his arm too. Klaus watches as he clocks the track marks on the inside of his elbow, his jaw tightening and shoulders rising. “Christ, man, what the hell are you doing to yourself?”

He resists the urge to fold up his arm or turn it over, partially because it’d hurt like a bitch to move his hand but mostly out of stubbornness. “Having fun. You should try it, sometime.”

Ben and Diego both give him the same exact expression, which is kind of hilarious. “ _This_ is fun, to you?” Diego asks, waving a hand at his general state. “Klaus, man, you’re gonna get yourself killed.”

Klaus shrugs, tries not to wince when it pulls a million different aching muscles. “So?” He asks.

This is a conversation he’s had with Ben what feels like a hundred times, so he only shakes his head, but Diego looks bizarrely lost all of a sudden, the fight going out of him for almost a full second before it comes back twice as strong. “ _So_?” He repeats. “ _So_?! Are you _serious_ right now?”

“He is,” Ben confirms, even though he knows Diego can’t hear him, will never hear him. “He’s a selfish idiot.”

“You say that like it’s news I’m selfish,” Klaus snaps at him. “Or an idiot.”

“Yeah, well, since I have to keep watching you _be one_ , I’m going to keep calling you one.”

“Fuck you, Ben, no one makes you stay.”

“ _Ben_?” Diego breaks in. “Jesus christ, you’re still high as a kite, aren’t you?”

He isn’t actually, he had taken the last of his stuff before the asshole gang had jumped him and he’s been in this hospital long enough he’s come around to as sober as he ever likes to get, but Diego is as likely to believe that as any of them ever have been to believe Ben is playing Casper the unfriendly ghost. He plasters on his silliest grin. “You gotta ask?”

His brother deflates again, hands coming up to rub at his eyes. He’s got a new scar, sometime in the past six years, although probably fairly recently if he’s judging by how the line of scar tissue descending from his scalp and across his temple is still a little pink. Klaus thinks about the four stitches in his own head, how much it hurts. Tries to guess how many stitches Diego’s long-ass scar must have taken. If he had even bothered to get stitches, hating needles as much as he does, if he just slapped a bandage on it and called it a day.

“You got a place to stay?” Diego asks after a few moments of silence. “Until your head heals up, at least?”

Last night he slept on the floor of some crackhouse. The night before that, he had passed out behind a dumpster. Last week he had been staying in some condemned building with some other squatters. He doubts he’ll be able to find someone to shack up with, looking like he does right now. He might have to suck it up and listen to some shelter lecture him about Jesus. He shrugs.

His brother sighs, lifting his head back up to look at him properly. “You can stay with me, for a few days. Maybe a week. Until I’m sure you’re not gonna start bleeding out of your eyes.”

Klaus considers him. Warns, “I’m not gonna get clean.”

Diego tries a smile. It looks like it physically pains him. “Just— no needles.”

He stays with him for three days, just long enough for the dizziness to pass and and the need to get high with only Ben to judge him to settle in. He doesn’t see Diego again for two years.

.

Having Dave back is— there aren’t words in any of the languages he was made to learn or any of the bits of languages he picked up when he left the Umbrella Academy to fully express how amazing and wonderful and _perfect_ having Dave here is. It’s like part of himself had been absent for months, something important and painful to have missing, and now it was back, and Klaus could breathe again. 

God, all he wants to do is, just… look at him. At the curve of his jawline, the sweep of his eyelashes when he closes his eyes, the slight stubble on his cheeks and jaw and neck, his broad, strong chest— where the wound that killed him seems much smaller than Klaus remembers it being in A Shau, less blood and gore. It could be the trauma of the memory making it out to be even worse than it was, but Klaus can’t help but remember how bad off Ben’s body had been, when he died, torn apart, and how by the time he had shown up as a ghost he’d been mostly back together, and within the year didn’t have a mark on him.

There’s a lot Klaus doesn’t know about ghosts, and more importantly, how his powers work with them. He knows, for sure, that Ben doesn’t look nineteen anymore, does, in fact, look thirty like the rest of them, but he still wears the clothes he died in. To be fair, they’ve never tried to have him change.

Which leads him, inevitably, back to Dave, and if he can even take his clothes off. Not that that’s a deal breaker, or anything like that— it’s not like they were having a bunch of sex before, anyways, beyond a few precious nights on liberty and a few quick, risky hand-jobs in the dark at the edge of camp. That was one of the many, many remarkable things about Dave; Klaus has never had a relationship before that wasn’t just about fucking.

Dave has been watching Klaus just the same as he was watching him, and he grins at him. “It’s really good to see you, sweetheart.”

Klaus grins back helplessly. “You’re telling me. _God_ , Dave. I love you.”

He reaches out to touch his face, his hand going right into his face before he pulls back. “Ah, damn,” he laughs with an apologetic smile.

Laughing too, he shakes his head and focuses for a second. “Wait, try again.”

This time the hand connects, this time he can feel the calluses of a soldier’s hands, of Dave’s hands, rough skin but gentle touch, and when he kisses him it’s like that first time in the bar in Vietnam but better, because, he realizes, this is the first time they’ve kissed when he’s sober and out of withdrawal, not flying out of his body and not stuck in it feeling so sick he could die.

There are ghosts in the mausoleum and ghosts on the streets but there is only one ghost here, right now.

He wouldn’t give up his powers for anything, if he gets to have Dave.

.

Klaus learns early that the loudest, most terrifying ghosts are those who’ve been killed by another person, and the most determined to attach themselves to the living— the living who aren’t him, anyways. Before he discovers booze and pills to dull the dead to nothing, he’s the hottest spot in town for whatever dead find him. He even distracts the murdered from stalking their killers, the opportunity to try and convince him to get justice for them, they who can’t do anything but watch and scream silently. He does try, for the first few, he can say that. He tells their father about the woman with bruises around her throat and the name of the man who left them, the man with the bullet holes in his head and which mob boss ordered him dead. But his father doesn’t care about that, never cared about anything but his own bizarre mission; all telling him does is lead to worse and worse training, more and more tests.

That first mission in the bank is a bloodbath. Luther kills first, throwing a man twenty feet in the air, through a window, and back down twenty feet to hit hard concrete. Diego’s second when he throws his knives around a corner and stabs a guy in the chest. And Ben, sweet, non-violent Ben, who helps Vanya rescue spiders to set them free in the garden… he sets the Horror free and it tears three men in half and crushes two more in its grip, crushing ribcages and squishing internal organs until they pop like a gory water balloon. 

(Klaus helps him pick intestines from his hair before they leave the bank, and mom works her magic on Ben’s domino mask when they get home, getting out bloodstains and the terrible smell of raw meat, but his uniform is written off and thrown out)

The next morning, when Klaus comes down for breakfast, there’s a man with more broken bones than unbroken ones haunting Luther, a guy who’s chest is covered in blood from two stab wounds hovering over Diego, and the ones following Ben— well. They don’t look human, anymore. He turns right around and runs to his room, smoking the two joints he had hidden in one of those waterproof cases duct-taped to the outside window frame after the last time dad tossed his room. When he goes back down for breakfast, he’s so obviously stoned everyone gives him judging looks and dad scoffs and makes a crack about disappointments, but the first successful mission seems to mollify him to a degree and Number Four being a disappointment has long stopped being a surprise. Most importantly, Klaus can’t see any ghosts.

He learns, the first time he has to fight on the line sober, just how many NVA soldiers the men in his unit have killed. These dead don’t haunt a specific man, don’t have any idea which nameless enemy killed them any more than Klaus knows which of them he put there. They all end up coming to him anyways, of course, to yell in a language he’s only picked up a few words of in the few trips to Saigon they’re gotten to take on liberty, but it turns out dad was right when he insisted his tie to the dead went beyond words because he knows they’re screaming for him to stop, stop firing at their friends left alive, stop fighting this damn war when they don’t even know what it’s _about_.

This is the thing about war: it’s surprisingly easy for him to block out the dead when there’s bullets flying, grenades exploding, men bleeding and screaming and dying. Adrenalin is one hell of a drug. He takes it and makes more ghosts.

.

Vanya walks in on them while Klaus is straddling Dave on the couch, kissing up and down his neck, nibbling on his jaw.

“Um.” She says, and Dave tenses under him, pulling away instinctively.

Klaus guesses it looks pretty weird, to her eyes— while Dave is solid, he’s not visible to anyone but Klaus and other ghosts. It must look like he’s got his hands curled in thin air, mouthing at nothing.

He reluctantly moves off of Dave’s lap, sighing. Dave looks like a deer caught in the headlights, so he rests a comforting hand on his shoulder.

“Hey, Vanya,” he greets her.

“Hey Klaus,” she echoes, then smirks. “And, uh, hey, Dave, I’m guessing?”

“Hi, Vanya,” Dave greets her, sheepish.

Klaus grins at him, and tells his sister, “Dave says hi. And thanks for not just assuming I’m making out with thin air.”

She tries and fails to suppress a grin. “Is this going to be a thing now? Because no offence, but I’d really like to not ever see you having ghost sex, so if I need to start knocking before entering _any_ room, could you let me know now?”

He sniffs in mock offence. “Fine. I will _attempt_ to keep any hanky-panky to my room, but no promises about make-outs.”

“ _Klaus_ ,” Dave chastises him, but he sounds mostly amused.

But Vanya just snorts. “Well, right now is practice, and it’s raining outside so I’ve going to risk destroying the house playing in here.”

“Vanya, dear, you haven’t accidentally blown anything up for weeks, I think you’ll be fine.” He hesitates, shooting a look at Dave before offering, “I can spot you?”

Dave gives him a confused look. “Spot her?”

It was something they had worked out, in the beginning. Vanya hadn’t wanted to give up violin, even though she was terrified of falling back into her mind control/all out destruction habits. They’d all been pretty concerned, themselves, honestly, but bizarrely, it was Luther who had insisted continuing with old routines and hobbies was important for Vanya’s recovery. All those PTSD and addiction recovery books seem to have taught him something.

So they worked out something of a routine— when it was time for Vanya to practice, or she needed to work out some emotion with her music, she would grab one of them to watch her, snap her out of it if she got too… involved. It was a not-infrequent occurrence at first, but over the months it became less of a chore and more of a delight, to watch her play.

Klaus grins at Dave. “Remember how I told you Vanya was amazing at the violin? We’re about to get a private concert.”

“I’d be honoured, Miss.” Dave tells Vanya, and when Klaus translates, she smiles, and picks up her violin.

.

He finds out he’s an uncle from the cover of some tabloid, brought in by one of the rehab employees for the patients to use to make collages as a form of therapy. One of the other guys (Jay, a few years younger than Klaus but the drugs make him look about a decade older than he is, fucked up and got his heart infected from shooting up with dirty needles or something) is holding it, about to start cutting it up. Klaus plucks it out of his hands— or, he lunges across the table to snatch it desperately away from his scissors.

“Hey!” Jay yells, standing up so fast his chair goes flying, but Klaus is already flipping through the magazine. BABY GIRL! screams the cover, next to a beaming picture of Allison and some blandly attractive man he’s seen on other covers with her. Her husband, his brother-in-law. The father, apparently, of his niece.

The magazine is already months out of date; his niece is five months old, already. When do babies start walking? Talking? The tabloid has been here long enough that it’s already been searched through for things to cut out, every few pages missing chunks. Sections of the article about Allison are just gone, harvested for the ads on the other side. There’s a missing bit with a caption about Allison showing off her baby bump that’s been taken by some projecting fan, probably, some junkie or drunk who used his sister’s face and body as a way to show he’ll get his life together and meet a girl just as beautiful and have a family, or something like that. A childhood of fame, of people forgetting he’s a real person who just so happened to talk to ghosts, a child forced to fight often violent criminals, not the personification of the superhero dreams of their fans, should have adjusted him to the idea of people not thinking of him and his siblings as people so much as ideas, and he long stopped giving a fuck when people did it to him— not that anyone even really remembers Number Four, other than as that one Umbrella kid who kept getting caught by the paparazzi high or drunk or making out with a dude a decade older than him while wearing a skirt— but somehow the idea of one of these assholes doing that to his sister makes him angry as hell.

“ _Hey_ ,” Jay says again, stepping forward to try and grab at the magazine Klaus is staring at more than reading. He clutches it to his chest protectively. “I was _fucking_ using that, asshole. Give it back.”

Jay is a methhead, and still not totally in touch with reality or reason. Klaus suspects the meth might have rotted some pretty important parts of his brain; there is a fair to high chance that he’s gonna start a fistfight with Klaus over the stupid magazine if he doesn’t hand it over. 

Klaus was never as good at hand to hand as his siblings, but he’s better than most random people off the street, if he’s not too high to function like he normally is. He’s stupidly sober right now, has been in this shitty court-ordered rehab for two weeks almost. He’s willing to put his childhood and teen years of fight training to the test for this magazine.

“This is really dumb, Klaus,” Ben sighs.

“Shut up,” he snaps at him.

“What did you say to me?” Jay asks, now about eight times angrier.

“Not you, Jay.” He considers for a second, then says, “Actually, yeah, you shut up too.”

“Oh, great,” Ben throws up his hands. “You want to get punched, don’t you?”

He does, honestly. Rehab is possibly his least favourite place to be, worse than crackhouses and damp alleys and jail. He can’t get high or drunk or even fuck, all there is to do here is talk about his feelings and shoot the shit with the other guys and hide from ghosts. Being sober is a never ending monotony of boredom and terror, and honestly getting punched in the face would at least spice up the days. But also—

“It’s our _sister_ , Ben. We’re— uncles?” The word leaves his mouth with far too much hesitance, foreign and strange.

“What the _fuck_ are you talking about, man?” Jay asks. He is, at this point, too thrown off by Klaus’ ‘talking to air’ shtick to punch him. For as much trouble as his weirdness and unwillingness to keep his mouth shut gets him in, it was only fair that on occasion it threw people off enough that he had time to make his escape.

He doesn’t make his escape. Ben has apparently given up on stoping Klaus from getting his ass kicked and has now tilted his head back so he’s staring at the ceiling.

Luckily— or unluckily, because in all honesty Klaus wouldn’t despise a good fist fight right now and Methhead Jay is probably his best bet for it— one of the counsellors calls Klaus away for his one on one appointment to talk about all his, like, _issues_. 

Before he checks out of rehab, he manages to track down the address for Allison’s fanmail and send a shoplifted teddybear with a short note signed with a kiss, the same lipgloss colour they used to steal back and forth from each other as kids.

Klaus has no idea if Allison ever gets it, and if she does, if the teddybear gets to Claire. It’s the thought that counts.

.

Dinner that night is take out from their favourite pizza place, their normal order of ten pizzas. Between feeding four people, a teenage boy, and Luther, they go through a lot of food, even if Vanya eats like a bird and Diego only eats his cauliflower crust veggie pizza.

They eat dinner at the kitchen table— no one really has any interest in using the dinning room, which was always where dad had them eat his highly regulated meals, with all his rules about not sitting before he did or speaking at all unless he quizzed them and listening to his batshit tapes about, like, surviving alone in the arctic or how to fight a shark. The kitchen table was always mom’s domain, where on the few occasions they were allowed to eat there, when dad was out of town or something, they were allowed to bicker and steal food off each other’s plates and act like the children and teens they had been.

It’s still a tight squeeze, all nine of them at that table, ten on the rare occasion Pogo joins them, which is still a little awkward; Pogo was more a dad to them than Reggie ever had been, but his secret keeping had cut deep, when he didn’t even have the same excuse as mom, who’s programming had literally stopped her from doing anything dad hadn’t wanted her to do.

He joins them for a little bit than evening, though, to introduce himself to Dave, who is suitably shocked by a talking chimp in clothing. Klaus grins at him, smitten, but Ben laughs outright.

The noise of all of them, with Allison’s frequent scribbling and then frantic waving of notes, whoever sees it first yelling out whatever she wrote for the rest of them to hear, and mom reminding them not to talk with their mouths full, and Klaus translating for Ben and Dave, is the happiest he’s been in— possibly ever, honestly.

Under the table, Dave holds his hand, the one that says _hello_.

 _Hello_ , he thinks at him, grinning while Dave grins back, sweet and happy.

Dave brings his hand up to kiss his knuckles, and tells him, “I love you.”

Yeah. He’s never been happier.

**Author's Note:**

> From what I can tell, the term Post Traumatic Stress Disorder didn't come into use until 1970, hence Dave not really knowing what Klaus is talking about. He might have known it as battle fatigue, a World War II term, but war neuroses is a more broad term.


End file.
